The stories are made up, but the problems are real.

Entries tagged with girliness

The light has changed. The temperatures are not really any cooler yet than they have been on average this cool summer–the highs were in the 80s today–but the light has shifted, this last week or so, and my hindbrain says, yes, fall. Here we are. Fall. We are home.

One of the strange consequences of this is a complete hindbrain unwillingness to wear things without sleeves. This is fine–I have many shirts and dresses with short sleeves that are fine for this weather. I just haven’t noticed it in previous late summers or early falls. It’s…a bit quirky. I reach for a sleeveless dress and it is clearly the wrong thing. Oh, brains. What I really have the urge to wear is my real clothes, tights and sweaters and clogs, but I am willing to wear your summer person drag a bit longer so I don’t roast. Well, sort of. I’m wearing tights* right now, actually, and I wore clogs outside with them. But the sweaters would be a bit much. I do admit that. This part is not new, it’s only the sleeves that are new. The urge to start wearing sweaters early and often is one of those traits that may be either genetic or environmental–hard to tell, because it wears a big ol’ sign reading “MOM.”

*The tights are bright blue and black plaid. You should be impressed with me that I held off wearing them this long, and by this long I mean a full three weeks of August non-tights weather since I bought them. You should be impressed with me that I did not sit down on the floor of Target and put them on right then and there. These tights called my name, people. They said, “Helllooooo, femme person!” And I said, “Present.” And they said, “You will wear us every time we are clean until it is cold enough that you only want to wear SmartWool. SEARCH YOUR FEELINGS YOU KNOW IT TO BE TRUE.” And I said, “Why do you not have siblings in maroon-and-black and hunter-green-and-black and purple-and-grey also?” And they said, “You are an only child, too, so stop quibbling and give the person a surprisingly reasonable number of your American cash dollars.” So I did, and here we are.

Another strange consequence of the change of the light is that the farmer’s market has plenty of parking again. It’s like the minute it’s not Officially Summer, people think there are no more vegetables? Or something? Half the food trucks packed up and left, too, so it was actually mostly the vegetables. It was the people selling things you cook, instead of things they’ve already cooked. I bought the king of daikons. This daikon will not fit in our fridge straight-on. I have to tilt it diagonally to get it in our fridge. You should not try a home invasion here (in general because it is very rude and also illegal but particularly now) because we have this daikon and we haven’t cut it up yet. It’s still an entirely feasible bludgeoning weapon. It cost $1 and had a luxuriant crown of leaves I had to cut off so it wouldn’t take up even more of the fridge. This daikon, people. I got tomatoes and corn and peppers and two kinds of long beans and all manner of goodness, but this daikon: it is a prodigy. For $1.

Apparently last weekend a small person of my acquaintance announced that he wanted to look like a college professor. I only heard this after the fact, but he succeeded admirably. And I sometimes think that the combination of him being in the single digits of age and autistic means that he will admit to stuff like that when other people mostly don't, and I think that's awesome of him. I remember when I was his age, I tried to compose Bohemian Artist outfits and Very Serious Scientist outfits, but I did not disclose this intention to my parents or godparents. (My godfathers, God love them, would have been no help whatsoever with this endeavor, as they were rather committed to the Person With A Modicum Of Fashion Sense oeuvre of small child outfits. But explaining my thinking at least might have explained some of the attempted combinations to my baffled and long-suffering mother.) And I did wind up with a Budding Suffragist On A Bicycle outfit that my grandmother and I both adored, but again, I did not tell her why I liked it. It was a very 1905 sort of bow on the thing.

So in the spirit of full disclosure, I will report that I am wearing my Sensible Grown-Up From An E. Nesbit Novel Visits The Mod Sixties outfit. I have had this reaction to this outfit (particularly the skirt) since I bought it. Every single time. I also have Wednesday Addams Appears on Laugh In and Piano Teacher Uninterested In Your Bullshit and Why Yes I Do Own A Krumkake Iron Why Do You Ask, among other fashion choices. A lot of the time, of course, I am dressed as Person Who Hates Complicated Laundry or Person Whose Feet Are Toasty Warm Despite The Weather Thanks. But sometimes we change things up.

The closest I ever came to buying non-hiking boots in the three digits of price was when I looked at a pair of boots and thought, "Every time I wore those, I would think, 'No, The Other Kind Of Goth.'" And that seemed like a very appealing thing to me. I still didn't buy them, but I was tempted.

So occasionally staying the same size and shape for, um, two decades now gets a little accidentally weird. In this case, if I didn't already have plans, I would feel like I should present myself at greykev's and demand to play Magic or possibly D&D. Because...um.

So the thing is, part of my afternoon plans involve rolling homemade truffles. Don't want to get a nice new shirt messy! Better wear an old one. But it's not very warm here. So this resulted in...a fitted ribbed grey long-sleeved shirt with an old red-and-grey flannel I can put on for warmth and take off when I'm working. And jeans which are not actually the same jeans but might as well be; random boot-cut jeans, same color, same size. And I'll want my hair out of my face, so I braided it. Thick wool socks. I'll put hiking boots on when I go out.

And I looked in the mirror and went, oh, hell, might as well go whole hog with the jewelry. So there's a rune necklace and my Stonehenge/Pi earrings and my rune ring, and by late 1997 I had my engagement ring, and while it's not the same watch, I've gotten approximations of this watch for years now because it's what I want in a watch. So the only new thing is a bracelet I got this year, which looks like it goes with all the rest.

Well. I guess sometimes you have to get back to your roots. It's just that I feel obliged to sing a little grunge medley instead of Christmas carols. Which may be appropriate for the afternoon's plans, too.

It's autumn here in Baja Canada, which you can tell because I'm wearing socks again, the tomatillos are going berserk, and my tisane consumption has gone from appallingly high to truly unbalanced. That latter, of course, may be due to the fact that the first chest cold of the season has arrived right on schedule, so I am occasionally alternating in what Midori's Floating World labels a honey-ginger latte, despite the fact that it contains no coffee whatever, which I thought was a requirement for a latte. It's just hot milk with honey and ginger. Really intense, but good on the throat. timprov figured out how to make them at home. He, too, is trying to rid himself of bits of lung. (markgritter too, but he is doing it in California at the moment, and also he refuses the goodness that is honey-ginger latte. timprov refuses the goodness that is tea. Only I know what's good, apparently.)

Yesterday's city, the capital of Britain's dearest ally in 1955? Oslo, Norway. Surprising Brits and Norsk alike, I expect. Well done, mastadge, although guessing all across Scandinavia at once does seem a bit...anyway, well done.

We have candidates for the dress for my godfather's wedding. We also have yet another reject. You know what I hate about those shows where they make people over, other than everything so I don't watch them? They are apparently constantly telling people to try things on in styles they don't usually wear. I do this. You know what happens? They don't fit. You know why I don't wear those styles? They don't fit! (Or else they look terrible on me.) Who are these people, who have styles that fit them perfectly well and are perfectly flattering, and they go around not-wearing them on a whim? Oh, tra la, I think I shall just not-wear perfectly good clothes that will look lovely on me, because there are just far too many perfectly good clothes looking lovely on me in this world, tra la! Also, they are far too readily available at reasonable prices, manufactured by people who are treated humanely and with reasonable environmental practices, tra la! Shut up, those people!

(Tried on a sheath dress in a perfectly beautiful shade of blue, which my mom purchased and brought over and will now have to return to the store with sad and dragging feet. It had a wide belt that would have accentuated my not-wide waist. Guess what? Did not fit. Surprise! Yet another Neal Stephenson dress. What, ask the newcomers, is a Neal Stephenson dress? It is a garment in which I could fit the complete works of Neal Stephenson in the waist of the thing with me. Gigantic cul-de-sacs of fabric, people. Why do I not wear sheath dresses in non-stretchy fabric? Because I am not shaped like a sword aaaaaaaagh the end.)

Don't get me wrong: sometimes I like thinking about clothing. But I don't like being made to think about clothing. I like having more or less default options for daily wear for whatever weather and being able to put those on and go about my business if nothing in particular is going on.

For the last few summers, my summer default has been a Nusa Rollover skirt from Athleta and a T-shirt. Done and done. Various colors. Hurrah. I wear other things. But if I just want to get dressed in something comfortable and decent-looking that will wash well, that is how I do it. This extends reasonably well into spring and fall with addition of tights and extension of shirt sleeves, so many of those of you who have seen me at all have seen me in one of these skirts. They are not the sort of skirts for which people will accost you on the street, squealing over the cuteness. They are fairly plain cotton knit skirts. One will not get arrested for indecent exposure in these skirts. One will not have to fuss about pulling them down when one gets out of a car. If one's friend's kid spills on them--if one spills on them oneself--they will wash well.

Until now.

The most recent batch I ordered were clearly of a different fabric, lighter weight and clingier. I frowned but wore them anyway. And after two or three washings in cold water, I went to put on the Sangria colored one yesterday.

It had two holes in the middle of the fabric. Just holes. Not even by the seam. Not where you could have stuck your finger through pulling the skirt on. The fabric, after two or three washings in cold water and wearings not at all strenuously around the house and possibly out to a restaurant, had developed holes.

I wrote to Athleta customer service, and they sent me a helpy* e-mail response about how I could pay $6 for a return or exchange. Golly! I could pay an additional $6 to have another skirt made of the same shoddy material? Or I could have my money back, less $6 for the privilege of dealing with them? I have written back to ask how this is customer-friendly, since it is in no way my fault that they have decided to make their skirts out of tacky crap. I may have phrased it more tactfully than that. But I have long been a fan of Athleta clothing like Athleta Nusa Rollover skirts, and have sung their praises here and elsewhere, and I am really not at all pleased with this development, because one of the main things I liked about their clothing was durability. They claim to cater to active women; active women do not have the time to pull out a garment and discover that the thing they bought just last month has already given up the ghost and they will need to run to the UPS store to spend money on exchanging it. That is not the kind of running active women want to do.

Bah.

*Helpy, adj.: the quality of sounding like one is being helpful without actually providing any help whatsoever. Thanks, matociquala, for this genuinely helpful word.

Update: They have offered to waive the shipping for a replacement or give me a full refund since it was their screwup. Which is reasonable; I just hope the quality gets back up again so I can keep using them.

Things I like: new story ideas when they have not been so thick on the ground in the last few months.

Things I do not so much like: when those new story ideas use my own family history as a very direct springboard.

I think the only thing for it is to write "Printer's Oak" when it needs to be written and then run it by Mom to make sure there aren't more serial numbers that need filing off for her to be comfortable with me sending it around; on the other hand, when the main character's great-grandparents are printers and a few other things that mine were, I'm not sure how much the serial numbers would come off. It's just that it turns out a lot of things make sense if you figure my great-grandfather was one of the Sidhe, is the thing. I have had this experience of reading history before, but not our history. Mostly the history of the Finns.

I'm no fashion expert, but I'm pretty sure that if you hold the seat of a pair of jeans up next to the window while folding it, you're not supposed to be able to see not just daylight but details of individual shingles and leaves outside the window through the cloth.

Sigh. Well, no one could accuse me of not getting good wear out of those, I guess.

Now it's just a matter of seeing if the jeans I ordered last year are still being cut that way. Hopehopehope.

(Note for the uninitiated: my mother doesn't like pigs. So when I was growing up, one tail was a ponytail--a side ponytail if it was on the side, because I was after all a child of the '80s--and two tails were puppytails.)

(I also wore my hair in Princess Leia buns on a fairly regular basis. I had a very happy childhood.)

Well. So. Is there anything I wouldn't do for this kid? Probably, but messing with my hair is so not over that line. So today I am wearing my giraffe pants and a camisole top. I attempted low puppytails, but in combination with the cami it made me feel like I was about to suggest to people that if they wanted to commence a sexual relationship with me they ought to pursue friendship first and that, in fact, what I really really wanted was a ziggah-ziggah-ahh. So as Geeky Spice is not a persona I ever intended to adopt, I braided each side. Then I looked in the mirror at the finished result.

Um. Will somebody please buy me an autoharp? Seriously. This is just alarming. I know I don't actually smell of patchouli, but I have to keep sniffing to make sure. And I have the sudden urge to macrame something.

Okay, fellow Really Pale Femmey Women! I think we need a preemptive writing on the blackboard exercise. Fifty times each:

"Just because Michelle Obama can wear that color does not mean I can wear that color."

We are going to need it this administration. Our new First Lady is veryvery good at dressing herself, not some idealized person on whom all trends look good, even the contradictory ones. And that is the lesson we need to learn from her clothes, not, "Ooh, she looks so pretty, I should wear exactly what she's wearing!"

Because she looks lovely, and we would look like three-month-old lutefisk in some of these colors.

Seriously. We need to take deep breaths and repeat, "Not every color is for every person, and that's okay."

First, I have sold my first short story of the year: Futurismic wants to buy "Erasing the Map." I like getting the first sale in January, not even too far into the middle of January. I like enthusiastic acceptance letters. I like finishing stories that percolate and percolate and finally go, and then other people like them too. In fact, I really have a hard time thinking of anything I don't like about this.

(Note to self: write more stories.)

And second, the jeans I ordered arrived, and they fit, so in the wash they go. And there was much relief. The booty dancing required to determine that jeans realio trulio fit and are not going to become SuperSpy jeans (creeping up silently behind their enemy) or suddenly gape at the waist enough to store your reading material for the next week* is not really all that much fun in fitting rooms with vertigo, particularly when the vertigo has caused me to go from having strong legs to having warrior princess thighs!!!, so a lot of the jeans available there are not fitting the different bits of me equally well. (How does vertigo do that, ask the latecomers and the people who didn't write it on their scorecards? Well, vertigo brings nausea. Nausea brings not eating. This is a problem. People need to eat--this is a long-held and deeply-felt philosophical position of mine. And so far just about the only thing that cuts through the nausea consistently enough to let me eat, like ya do, is going from 45 minutes of biking on the big sturdy recumbent bike 4-5 days a week--plus PT and yoga and Pilates--to doing about 90 minutes of biking on the said recumbent bike 7 days a week--still plus PT and yoga and Pilates. Fear the might of my vertigo-powered legs. Srsly. F34r. If I wasn't so tired, I could totally crush Tokyo, or any other monster-movie-hosting city. If they'd give me something to hang onto while I did it.) So being able to do the requisite booty dancing while holding onto my very own dresser--as a barre, as it were--was very useful, go internet, go jeans, go elaborate dance of denim-verification.

It's been a rough week around here, for an assortment of reasons, some of which you will be able to come up with yourselves if you think hard. But here we are Friday, and there's a story sale, and there are jeans, and markgritter is coming home, and while I only managed lunch by telling myself I didn't have to think about lunch, I just had to eat lunch, I did eat lunch, and it was nice. In fact, I commend it here to you: red quinoa cooked in broth (mushroom broth is favored; other broths will do) with pecans and dried sour cherries. It has a wide variety of nutrients and is warm and savory and tastes interesting without being difficult if you're not very sure of this food thing at the moment.

So yah. Story. Quinoa. Jeans. Stuff.

*I have said, haven't I? that my mother's first exposure to Neal Stephenson was as a measure of clothes that don't fit me. I have said, "I could stick the complete works of Neal Stephenson in this waistband with me--in hardcover!" more times than she or I could count, when we were clothes shopping together.

So at Fourth Street elisem had Heather Corinna take a bunch of photos of people wearing shinies made by her. And I was one of those people, and if you want to go look, there are a couple of my necklaces:

1. If you are writing a web interface, do not specify a font color but not a background color or vice versa. This is what we know as sloppy and bad.

2. Clothes shopping online to replace things that have worn out. What did we say about pencil skirts for at least the last six seasons? Together now, in a weary drone: mrissa is not shaped like a pencil. Puff sleeves: do I look like Anne of Green Gables to you? (If yes, check again: red hair? No. Freckles? Only very pale pathetic ones. Best friend who would put a cake ad in my fiction? Not hardly. Earnest assumption of all humanity's goodness? Guess again, bucko.) It's a faux-denim faux-A-line skirt? Great! Then I'm faux buying it! And if you could pick out of all the possible women models in the world, and you couldn't make your shorts look any better than that, why are you selling them? Pick out the stitching, cut up the fabric for a quilt or a pillow or something and hide your shame. Some people would feel better that the shorts they tried on earlier in the season looked on them just about exactly as they did on the model. Me, I feel sorry for the model, because I took the things off and departed the scene as swiftly as the vertigo would allow, rather than standing around letting somebody get photographic evidence that I'd ever worn the wretched things. And the ones I tried on were brown; the model's are in periwinkle pinstripes! There are very few occasions that call for periwinkle pinstriped shorts, in my experience. Perhaps I'm missing out and you're all having parties for which they would be just the thing and not inviting me. Good. Carry on with not inviting me. Periwinkle pinstripes. It's self-mocking!

3. How being a little-known SF and fantasy short story writer is better than being a candidate for PotUSA/VPotUSA (selections from long, long list): the people you deal with like to teach you things, and some of them even like to learn. If someone tries to appoint you to a committee, you don't have to pretend to like it. You can do whatever you want with your hair and it does not affect the success of your career: shaved off? Longer than your butt? Dyed blue? Looped up in dozens of little loops with sparkly butterfly clips? Nobody. Cares. Also if a member of your family gets pregnant, the only people who have opinions on this event are people who have known her name for more than a week. Also if you try to get something stupid published, nobody cares as long as you don't succeed. And when there are good sushi restaurants in the cities where we have our conventions, we eat there.

4. Post-travel vertigo: the less said, the better. But oof.

5. I can tell I'm ready to start really serious writing on The True Tale of Carter Hall, because interesting tidbits about four other novels have popped into my head. I wrote them down and closed the files. Focus is our friend. Our elusive, popular friend who is never around when we want to catch up over a cup of coffee.

6. The vertigo is still making reading nonfiction less fun than it ought to be, but at the moment I feel compelled to be stubborn. We'll see how that goes.

This is not my con report. This is about a thing that happened, though.

I was sitting in the programming room waiting for the rest of the panelists to arrive (having finished lunch and PT*), and marykaykare came in looking mysterious and pleased and said to me, "If you go speak to elisem, you will hear something to your advantage."

Well! I told Mary Kay that I like things to my advantage -- that I am firmly in favor of them, in fact -- and so I grabbed markgritter's arm, and off we went to the dealer's room to see elisem.

She was working on a shiny, as is so often the case, and there was some initial chatter, very casual, and then she consulted me: shinies are like books, and sometimes it helps if someone else can provide a second opinion, so did I think this one was almost done? I looked. It most certainly was. Did I think the labradorite was the right face out? I did.

She handed it to me and said, "Someone wrote to me and said, 'Mris is having That Kind Of Week, and you're going to see her soon; will you make her a shiny from me?' And here it is."

So I now have a silver wandering wire and labradorite pendant, and it is so shiny, and I am so pleased. And I'm pretty sure that my mysterious benefactor is someone who reads this journal. And you know what's great about my life? I have no idea who it is, because there are too many possibilities; I can't say, "Oh, obviously it must be x," or "y is simply the only person who could and would do that."

So you have given me the present of the shiny individually; and with the present of making it a secret surprise, you have reminded me of the gift of all the other people in my life who might have been responsible for it with you. Thank you, mysterious benefactor. It is Just Right.

*I did not miss a single session of PT this weekend. I am the Virtuous Mris Of Great Virtue. Just ask me.

1. My regular e-mail is in up-and-down mode lately, and since I'm in up-and-down mode myself, the coincidences of the two are not always fortuitous in terms of me getting to read and reply to things. Just so's you know.

2. markgritter got home this morning early. His luggage did not. So we have hopes in that direction, eventually. Apparently his luggage decided that a vacation to Seattle was just the ticket. As none of you in the greater Seattle metro are close personal friends with our luggage, I expect that there are no glad cries greeting this announcement; certainly we were not inspired to any.

3. I re-discovered this morning that it is not a good omen for my enjoyment of a book when an author sees fit to describe characters in terms of which movie stars they resemble. It doesn't matter if they've chosen classic actors and actresses rather than the flavor of the month -- I'd have thought it would, but it doesn't. It's just generally a signal that this author wants me to process a book differently than I want to process a book, and other mismatches will almost certainly follow. Now that I've said this, someone will come up with an exception that I did actually like. I almost hope they do.

4. The snow mound in the center of our circle is gone, and the ice is off the nearby lakes. I can't swear to the condition of larger lakes.

5. If this washes as well as I think it will, I will get one in each color (the one I have now is black) and wear them until they fall apart. So very comfortable. (And my experience of Athleta's stuff is that "until they fall apart" is really quite some time.)

6. This week has been rather fuller than I expected. There's the currently-normal PT stuff, which is not any fun all by itself. And there were fun additions (like doing Career Day at an area high school, more on which anon) and one horrible addition that turned out all right: my friend V's dog was attacked by three other dogs -- completely out of the blue and unprovoked, says an unbiased witness -- and was injured enough to need veterinary care. He's doing all right now, poor boy, but he was a rescue dog in the first place; he didn't need more violence and fear in his life. But Mom and timprov and I went up to visit V and the pup, and we scritched his tummy and let him lay on my arm and whack timprov affectionately with his big square head and generally told him what a brave good boy he was. So we're very glad he's healing and also very glad that he's not too fearful to enjoy new monkeys.

Anyway, I am more or less whumped. I seem to have acquired a list of stuff to say once I get around to saying it, but apparently now is not that time. Have a good weekend.

I have mostly steered clear of controversial political issues in this lj, but a friend's post has made me aware that there is an issue on which I can no longer in good conscience keep silence.

To wit: playoff beards. I am for 'em. Let there be no confusion: distinctly in favor. Brent Burns looks like a demented hillbilly in his, to be sure, but Burnsie looks like a demented hillbilly under most circumstances, so that harm is outweighed by the great joy that is everybody else's playoff beard.

In fact, while I'm enjoying the NHL playoffs a great deal more than I am enjoying or expect to enjoy the PotUSA playoffs (though with equal doubts, I suspect, about the officiating), I would like to suggest that people could grow playoff beards for that as well. Don't shave until your team wins the...well, it's not as cool as the Stanley Cup, but if you don't bother to learn to play hockey, you can't really expect it. But the US Presidency, at least, which has a few consolations despite its distinct lack of Stanley Cup. And if you don't have a team in this particular set of playoffs, you could still grow a playoff beard in support of those who do, and sort of to add to the pleasant parts of the spectacle of the thing. At least for me personally, and isn't that what's important here?

People whose beards look as though someone snuck in while they were sleeping and drew on their face with a cheap Bic pen and then ran away when it looked like they were waking up are exempt from this exhortation, I suppose. I suppose.

Also, nobody is strictly required to buy a Life of Brian style beard for my amusement. No. Definitely not a requirement.

Having a well-fitting, comfortable brassiere, a string of very shiny stones, and warm socks on (along with assorted other garments and adornments) does not fix everything. In fact, it fixes hardly anything.

I ran my tights first thing at the bagel place this morning. Came home to find the next pair of brown tights in the drawer was not run but clocked from hell to breakfast. Sigh. So I am on brown tights version three this morning. Any further tights damage means changing my clothes completely.

But as I was digging through the tights drawer, something became very very clear to me: the Great Trouser Experiment of 2003-2004 is officially over. Three and four Christmases ago, I got trousers, on the theory that, hey, I live here, it gets cold, I might want some trousers. Turns out: no. Many of the things sold to women to be "dressy" are no warmer than good tights and a skirt, if as warm. I will now -- sometimes, occasionally -- rarely -- wear corduroys. But in general, the attempt at trousers was a dismal failure, and I declare it done, and I'm not really interested in going back. Jeans, yes. Skirts and dresses, yes. Trousers...not so much. It turns out. I just can't get into it, really.

Also, I have started looking for a "light-colored" dress (or matching skirt and blouse, but more likely a dress) upon the bride's request for a wedding in the late winter. I have time, so I've just been doing online preliminary looking. It's good for me to get out of the dark colors rut. (Although I like it in here and will probably slip right back in after this wedding.) But so far the only pale blue options I've found are from a store that thinks I am a size 8 on top and a size 2 on the bottom. Hint: that's not going to work. So I may have alterations in my future, and I certainly have further shopping in my future, but -- hello, clothing manufacturers! I am not a size 2! I don't particularly want to be a size 2! I do not feel all vain and proud when you try to make my measurements into a size 2! I am fine with the 4 I generally wear. Don't go vanity sizing me into nothingness and some of my friends into negative numbers. And this thing where you make the waist and hips bigger and not the bust: I am not feeling loved, clothing manufacturers. I am not feeling your affectionate regard. I am not even feeling like a Barbie doll, but I'm feeling like you think I am one. That makes me annoyed with you, not with myself.